This past century has seen emerging communications markets skip an
entire generation of technology infrastructure, namely, the wired
telephone system. Large portions of the population in countries like
India and China now have cell phones in areas that never had traditional
landlines.

If these countries build a transportation infrastructure based on the
model in the United States, the emissions could have a major impact on
the climate. However, if they choose to skip a generation of
infrastructure, emissions growth will be far more manageable. In an
effort to do this very thing, China has been investing heavily in modern
mass transit, and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). They
have surpassed the United States in both these areas and yet Americans
cling to the outdated model.

Can we achieve a similar critical dematerialization of communications through telepresence as an effective substitute for much repetitive business travel? We need to do it, and we now have the technology to do it. So my best guess is—to coin a phrase—‘yes we can’.

Paul Dickinson, as CEO of the Carbon Disclosure
Project (CDP), used these words to rally his troops behind the
telepresence revolution. As part of their ‘yes we can’ attitude the CDP
conducted a comprehensive study
examining the environmental and economic benefits of using telepresence
in the short term, and after long-term, large-scale adoption of this
technology.

The CDP study piggybacked on the Smart 2020 Report
that forecasts an emissions savings of 7.8 billion tons of CO2 by 2020
through the smart integration of ICT in the workplace, and personal
space. In an effort to better quantify the environmental and financial
impact of telepresence, the CDP collected data from 15 of the Global 500
companies that have already upgraded to the telepresence model.

The CDP concluded that telepresence could avoid millions of tons of
CO2. A single business with four telepresence rooms can reduce CO2
emissions by the equivalent of 400 passenger vehicles in the span of
five years, 2,271 metric tons. Implementing telepresence throughout the
US has the potential to reduce emissions by almost a million metric tons
per year.

Besides the environmental benefits, the CDP study also concluded that
deployment of telepresence in businesses with annual revenues of more
than $1 billion could see an economy wide financial benefit of $3.5
billion by 2020 and this is in the US alone.